Reviews of the ephemeral

Menu

Monthly Archives: July 2012

-Reviewed by Rosie Breese- Love and the night sky. Are these the oldest and most over-used ideas in existence? Is there such a thing as a clichéd subject? Lucy Harvest Clarke’s bold, unique collection EX3 (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press) says no. Again and again, in ever more intriguing tongues. Let’s start with the final poem…

-Reviewed by Charles Whalley- The Jam Trap, with comic-style illustrations for each of its short prose poems, around two characters who talk about Xboxes, marbles and this song, has an accessibility which belies its confident ingenuity. The majority of the lively two dozen poems are almost entirely dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘you’, in a familiar…

@ The Old Fire Station – reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj – This month Sabotage had the chance to catch two upcoming spoken word shows by two of Oxford’s foremost poetic talents. Both were excellently feminist and political, touching on social issues that effect pretty much all women (and many men, for that…

@ The Dogstar – Reviewed by Dana Bubulj – Tea Fuelled are sending their performers up to the Edinburgh Fringe. I got to see their previews, double-billed over three nights at the Dogstar in Brixton. They varied in finish, but with polish some should be some fantastic (and free!) shows to see if you’re up there. Will…

-Reviewed by Ian Chung- Russell Barker initially completed what would become Disc-0 during NaNoWriMo 2008. Having set the novel aside for a couple of years, he has recently revised and self-published it. Unfortunately, although it has an interesting premise, the final product still ends up reading like a first draft. The story begins promisingly enough: ‘And…

-Reviewed by Alex Campbell- Trying to review ekphrastic poetry provides the challenge of either trying to judge the poetry on its own merits, or become an impromptu art critic. Ekphrasis – or the translation of works of art into different media, in this case the visual into the written – is a long standing pursuit,…

-Reviewed by Rishi Dastidar- Where do you find your muse? Can you find it on a street? And if a street is destroyed, can you use words and pictures to begin to rebuild it, and not just your memories, but other people’s? These, and other questions, are obliquely posed in Christodoulos Makris’ limited edition…

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey- This small, self-published pamphlet opens with ‘Homework’, a stream of consciousness that flows, like Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy, unhindered by a single full stop. The ‘blood-red Spanish wine seeping my studies’ is in a mug, but as soon as the reader has smiled at that small detail, some unsettling images are introduced.…

-Reviewed by Diane Tingley- Literary Juice is a bi-monthly online magazine, its blurb states that it is dedicated to extracting “100% originality from its writers.” This is a bold statement. Indeed I find much to like in the approach of the small editorial team – but why do I also get the nagging feeling that…

-Reviewed by Sophie Mayer- ‘it’s a port and i’m a girl’ There, in the final line of Sarah Crewe’s poem ‘grebes do alice at albert dock,’ is the heart of this collection: the playful tensions between the world and the poet, between the city (Liverpool) and its inhabitants, between concrete reality and literary transfigurations, between…